Go to the bank and tell them “I need a contract that will pay out money if there is no pandemic.”. (The bank is now rubbing their hands, because this offsets their risk.) Your costs are no longer speculative, and you can safely pass on the cost of the contract to the consumer.
That’s a much better version than my “require companies to disclose and document production plans, require them to share their probability estimates of how likely they think things are to be needed, keep them honest by allowing third parties to bet against them at their published probabilities”.
Go to the bank and tell them “I need a contract that will pay out money if there is no pandemic.”. (The bank is now rubbing their hands, because this offsets their risk.) Your costs are no longer speculative, and you can safely pass on the cost of the contract to the consumer.
That’s a much better version than my “require companies to disclose and document production plans, require them to share their probability estimates of how likely they think things are to be needed, keep them honest by allowing third parties to bet against them at their published probabilities”.
This is a lot like a pandemic bond, though apparently they existing ones still haven’t paid out? https://apnews.com/9b6191d5d82145c237b470525e2e9515 https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/821000049/pandemic-bonds